User:Nthmost
Naomi Most aka nthmost — Member since August 25, 2009
Quick Links
- Contact: nthmost on Discord | Slack | GitHub
- Languages: Irish (fluent), French (business fluent), Japanese (conversational), English (native)
- Background: Math & Linguistics • Bioinformatics • Data Analysis • Open Source Software
Professional highlights:
Community Work & Philosophy
The important stuff:
1. HackerspaceCommunityDynamics
2. Guilds - I care deeply about guild structure as a model for distributed authority and knowledge-sharing
3. Recent writing:
- Anarchy Paralysis - Why communities fail to act on harm
- Missing Stair - Routing around harmful behavior
- Restorative Communication - Framework for addressing conflicts
- Open Letter - On emotional labor and community care
🦆 Rubber Ducky Guild 🦆
The Rubber Ducky Guild is my flagship guild concept at Noisebridge.
The premise: explaining your problem to a rubber duck (or any patient listener) often reveals the solution. This guild practices:
- Listening without fixing - Sometimes people just need to talk it through
- Question-asking as an art - The right question unlocks understanding
- Psychological safety - No judgment, no mockery, just presence
- Debugging life, code, and everything - Works for technical problems AND emotional ones
Status: Active concept, seeking interested practitioners
See also: Rubber duck debugging on Wikipedia
Working Groups & Involvement
- Security Working Group
- Community Working Group
- Fractal Working Group - A concept I created. Success metric: we haven't had a single meeting yet.
Open Source Work
Python Libraries
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| metapub | PubMed/NCBI research access library | 100s of stars, cited in papers |
| illuminate | Bioinformatics toolkit | In use at CDC |
| secureconfig | Secure configuration management | Active |
| sensate | Sensor data toolkit | Active |
All projects: github.com/nthmost • pypi.org/user/nthmost
Tech I Like to Use
- AMQP
- liquidsoap + icecast
- Asterisk PBX
- Raspberry Pi
- Python (obviously)
Streaming Radios I Host
Live studios:
Algorithmic stations:
Stack: liquidsoap to sculpt the station, Python to wrap it, icecast to stream it.
Education & Languages
Academic Background
- Mathematics - University studies
- Linguistics - University studies
- Bioinformatics - Professional work in computational biology and data analysis
Languages
- English - Native
- Irish (Gaeilge) - Fluent speaker 🇮🇪
- French - Business fluent
- Japanese (日本語) - Conversational
Miscellaneous
Voluntary Public Embarrassment
Public Keys
/etc/passwd entry
$ sudo adduser --gecos 'Naomi Most' --shell /bin/bash nthmost